RCNDE’S current strategic research and application-driven targeted research programmes address the industrial members’ future vision for NDE. This includes novel techniques, sensors, data capture and processing, and advanced automated and miniaturised delivery systems. All are aimed at underpinning the future of a wide range of industries spanning processing, manufacturing and infrastructure-based industries. As a result, our portfolio of projects spans from blue-sky highly innovative projects aimed at developing significant step changes to emergent future problems, to technology transfer projects which allow an efficient, fast and streamlined transitioning of technologies developed during past projects. Our aim is to cover as much as possible of the technology readiness levels (TRL) to transform NDE into a fully integrated part of the engineering life cycle.
Aimed at TRL 1-3, they create and develop solutions for requirements in NDEvR Vision. They are medium-sized projects involving some of the exiting RCNDE university partners and have the support from the whole industrial membership represented via NDEvR.
These projects address medium-to-long term NDE requirements of member companies, as well as fulfilling RCNDE’s strategic objectives. They also are mid-sized projects aimed at the practical application of research (TRL 1-4). They are led by one of the RCNDE university partners and receive support from a subset of industrial members.
These projects are an efficient, fast and streamlined mechanism for transitioning RCNDE technologies into industry and are aimed at TRL 4-6. Their size can range from 6 months to 3 years.
RCNDE supports research outside the NDEvR vision via the Aligned projects category. These projects can be led by any UK university, not only those part of RCNDE, and receive in-kind support from RCNDE in the form of access to facilities and specialist advice. They can aim at TRL1-6 and differ from the rest in that the research does not address requirements from the NDEvR vision. Early Career Fellowships and New Investigator awards are also considered Aligned Projects.
This case study details research to maximise area coverage per sensor in permanently installed monitoring. It resulted in the development and patent of a new Location Specific Temperature Compensation (LSTC) method which, among other applications, has been trialled on a bulk ultrasonic wave monitoring system and shown to perform very well.
The research team at Strathclyde has been researching the use of robotics in NDE since 2006. Early work on small mobile robot platforms for delivering ultrasonic and magnetic flux leakage measurements was matured with NNL into an on-site inspection at Sellafield supporting Magnox reprocessing life extension in 2012. Subsequent work on mobile robotics concentrated on bringing classical robotic path planning and location systems (such as SLAM–simultaneous location and mapping) together with novel approaches using ultrasound to provide both NDE and path planning data.
The University of Bristol’s research in ultrasonic array technology applied to non-destructive testing has forever changed the way safety critical inspections are carried out and helped to extend the service life of valuable assets, boost revenue and improve safety in high-value engineering sectors such as nuclear and aerospace.
Developed by the University of Nottingham’s Optics and Photonics Research Group led by Professor Matt Clark, SRAS (Spatially Resolved Acoustic Spectroscopy) is a technique that can rapidly map the surface grain structure of materials, giving reliable and accurate data about shape, size and orientation of each grain.
